Paper Tigers

What media moguls make.

Murdoch is closer to old-school press barons such as Pulitzer and, especially, Hearst than he is to their more mannerly successors.Credit EDWARD SOREL

The Wall Street Journal began as a late-nineteenth-century version of a Bloomberg terminal—a high-priced, custom-produced collection of timely data on the financial markets which was distributed to people who planned to trade on the information. Starting in 1882, Dow Jones & Co. published a financial newsletter that messenger boys would deliver to its customers on Wall Street. Not long after, the company came out with the Customer’s Afternoon News Letter, an end-of-day summary, and in 1889 this publication changed its name to the Wall Street Journal. Seven years later, Adolph Ochs, the young owner of the Chattanooga Times, bought the listless New York Times for seventy-five thousand dollars, and the rise of the two great élite American newspapers had begun.

Back then, nobody would have picked the Times and the Wall Street Journal as the country’s most important newspapers. That distinction belonged to two papers that have long since disappeared: Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. The papers, and their owners, were flamboyantly rich, Democratic, populist, and popular. Although they sometimes purveyed information and analysis, in the manner of the Times and the Wall Street Journal, their business was mainly telling stories—turning the life of the world’s rising metropolitan, industrial superpower into captivating adventure and drama.

Because Pulitzer and Hearst were so irresistibly colorful, they have long been catnip for biographers. Kenneth Whyte, the editor and publisher of the Canadian news magazine Maclean’s, has just produced a new partial, though lengthy, biography called “The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst” (Counterpoint; $30), which he evidently wrote more as a result of having fallen in love with his subject than of having come across new material to reveal. Occasionally, Whyte takes a swat at previous biographers for having got something wrong, or rises to proclaim Hearst’s superiority to Pulitzer, especially as a person whom it was pleasant to work for. Mainly, though, he focusses on retelling the story of the brief period from 1895, when Hearst bought the Journal, to 1898, when its famous coverage of the Spanish-American War drew to a close—only because the war did, too.

Pulitzer, a cultivated but penniless Hungarian immigrant, bought the World in 1883, after having launched his career in St. Louis, first as a protégé of Carl Schurz, the German-American reformer, then as a state legislator, and, finally, as the owner of the Post-Dispatch. Although he established himself as a gentleman scholar, an art connoisseur, and a high liver, Pulitzer had an almost magical connection with the common man. He rose in journalism in the days when it was a branch of politics (as did Hearst, whose father was a U.S. senator, and who served two terms in Congress himself, while longing for the Presidency), but he figured out how to get the market, rather than the political parties, to support a newspaper.

Pulitzer’s fortune was built on single-copy sales, at a penny a paper, on the streets of New York. His estimation of the reading appetites of immigrants was far higher than that of many of his reformist friends, and his readers proved him right. He served up a blend of investigative reporting, instruction about city life, comics (including “The Yellow Kid,” the source of the derisive label “yellow journalism”), cheerleading for the Democratic Party, adventure, and true-life soap opera about tycoons and trusts, cops and crooks, Madonnas and whores. In Pulitzer’s words, the World would become “a journal that is not only cheap but bright, not only bright but large, not only large but truly democratic.” (In 2005, the novelist Nicholson Baker and his wife, Margaret Brentano, published a book called “The World on Sunday,” which, simply by reproducing a few dozen color spreads from the Sunday edition of the World, conveyed the Pulitzer formula beautifully.)

Hearst, a decade and a half younger than Pulitzer, first encountered the World when he was a student at Harvard. After dropping out, he went home to San Francisco and took over the management of the Examiner, a minor holding of his father’s, successfully using the Pulitzer editorial formula. By the time Hearst bought the Journal, Pulitzer was ailing, and Hearst was prepared to go him one better (or, depending on one’s perspective, worse). To promote the Journal, Hearst printed posters and sent brass bands through the streets of New York. He hired away many of Pulitzer’s brightest stars, such as Morrill Goddard, whose scoops had included dressing as an undertaker and sneaking into Julia Dent Grant’s carriage as she rode in the funeral procession of her husband, President Grant, and persuading a sixteen-year-old “artist’s model” to reveal that she was hired to burst naked out of a papier-mâché pie at a dinner party for a group of prominent men. Other bylines that appeared in the Journal are Winston Churchill, Benito Mussolini, Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, Richard Harding Davis, Julian Hawthorne (son of Nathaniel), and Frederick Remington, the artist who claimed (without proof, alas) to have received a telegram from Hearst that said, regarding Cuba, “You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.”

As a Westerner and the son of a self-made silver baron, Hearst understood better than Pulitzer the appeal of William Jennings Bryan and his attacks on the gold standard. He and two of his star journalists, the correspondent Alfred Lewis and the cartoonist Homer Davenport, also saw that Bryan’s opponent in the 1896 Presidential election, William McKinley, was too stolid to play the villain in the pages of the Journal—but that Mark Hanna, his campaign mastermind and the Karl Rove of the day, would make an ideal substitute. The 1896 campaign became, in the Journal, a titanic, circulation-building battle of rural virtue against capitalist rapacity.

After the campaign, Hearst found his next monster story in Spain’s brutal suppression of the uprising by liberation forces in Cuba. Nothing that appeared in the American press in 2002 and 2003 about the misdeeds and dangers of Saddam Hussein is in the same league of journalistic excess as Hearst’s treatment of Spain between 1896 and 1898. Hearst was especially adept at finding melodramatic hooks that could help whip up martial sentiment (and Journal sales). One was the imprisonment, by the Spaniards, of seventeen-year-old Evangelina Cossio y Cisneros, who was said to be the niece of the President of the Cuban revolutionary government, which the Journal played as a classic story of a beautiful virgin princess menaced by swarthy brutes. When she was freed, Hearst’s headline was “EVANGELINA CISNEROS RESCUED BY THE JOURNAL.” Another hook was the sinking of the battleship U.S.S. Maine in the Havana harbor in February, 1898. Whether the Spaniards deliberately sank the Maine, whose presence in Havana was itself partly testament to the influence of the Journal, is still the subject of historical dispute, but the Journal’s coverage was untroubled by doubt. On the third day after the incident, its headline was “THE WHOLE COUNTRY THRILLS WITH THE WAR FEVER.” (Whyte insists, not very persuasively, that this only appears “blatantly jingoistic when torn from context.”) In May, after Congress had declared war, Hearst ran the slogan “How do you like the Journal’s war?” on either side of the paper’s nameplate.

Whyte ends his account with Hearst only in his mid-thirties (and more than half a century before his death), so he doesn’t describe how Hearst acquired a series of newspapers and magazines and built them into a big media company that is still prominent today, decades after the demise of the New York Journal. (In 2006, the company completed a grand headquarters skyscraper, a project planned in the nineteen-twenties and halted during the Great Depression; Joseph Pulitzer’s heirs sold their family’s media business in 2005.) During Hearst’s lifetime, his properties continued to make most of their money from sales on the street or on newsstands. But, as the twentieth century wore on, new media—national magazines, then radio, then television—took on the entertainment function that big-city newspapers had performed in Hearst’s heyday, and newspapers shifted their economic base from street sales to subscriptions and advertising.

Say what you like about the sacred separation of a newspaper’s editorial and business sides: the way a publication makes its money inevitably affects its tone and content. When political parties were primary supporters of newspapers, in the nineteenth century, the newspaper barons were editor-politicians, like Horace Greeley. The twentieth century eventually brought us a more respectable and authoritative kind of newspaper journalism that went down more smoothly with advertisers and subscribers than the raffish journalism that generated street sales. Along with this change, most of the people who ran newspapers became less like impresarios and more like burghers. One of these was Adolph Ochs; another, fifty years younger, was Barney Kilgore, who built the Wall Street Journal into the first national mass-circulation daily newspaper.

Kilgore, the son of a small-town schools superintendent turned insurance agent, grew up and went to college in Indiana, was promptly hired by the Wall Street Journal (in 1929, just a few weeks before the stock-market crash), and never worked anywhere else. Richard J. Tofel’s new biography, “Restless Genius: Barney Kilgore, The Wall Street Journal, and the Invention of Modern Journalism” (St. Martin’s; $25.95), makes it clear that the Journal, despite its name, is culturally a Midwestern institution, much of whose high command, during the years of its rise, had, like Kilgore, graduated from DePauw University, in Greencastle, Indiana.

Kilgore’s children made available to Tofel a trove of letters that Kilgore wrote to his parents, the first in 1913, when Kilgore was five; the last in 1954, five years before his father died, at eighty-four. Never was there a more devoted son, a more attentive father and mother, or a more uncomplicated parent-child relationship. Kilgore matter-of-factly reported home on just about every grade in every class in college, every story for the Journal, every step up the ranks of management; and his father (his mother died in 1941) gave gruff encouragement, sometimes leavened with a plainspoken notation of how there might be room for improvement in his performance. For several periods during the Depression, Kilgore sent his parents a little money every week to help them get by, which they accepted gratefully, and without embarrassment, but returned if they didn’t need it. We are inside a competent, unflashy, steady-on-the-tiller world here.

Tofel, who worked at the Wall Street Journal for many years, writes in clean, precise newspaperman’s prose. Every time he mentions a sum of money, such as Kilgore’s salary in 1936, he tells us what it would be in today’s dollars. Every once in a while, he lets loose a string of superlatives meant to make the case for Kilgore’s historical importance—Kilgore helped invent anecdotal leads, and journalism that explains technical topics to lay audiences, and the publication of strings of small news items that run down a column on a page—but these usually seem like reaching, in a salesman’s voice that doesn’t come naturally to Tofel.

Kilgore and his colleagues did figure out how to publish a home- and office-delivered daily newspaper nationally, something that was far more difficult to accomplish in the nineteen-forties and fifties than people who have grown up with the Internet can imagine. The Journal’s circulation, which was thirty-two thousand when Kilgore became its managing editor, in 1941, rose to just above a hundred and fifty thousand in 1950, eight hundred and twenty-five thousand in 1962, and almost a million when Kilgore died, of cancer, at the age of fifty-nine, in 1967. When Kilgore started out at the Journal, reporters sometimes sold advertising, and Kilgore’s own early work as a reporter entailed experimentation with forms carried over from the nineteenth century, such as articles written as letters to an imaginary friend. By the time the Journal had come to full maturity, it had helped establish the journalistic norms of reportorial nonpartisanship and of independence from advertiser pressure. As Tofel observes, it was less a standard newspaper than a news-and-business magazine published daily on newsprint, closer to Fortune and Business Week than to either Hearst’s New York Journal or the Times, both of which were edited on the assumption that they would be their readers’ sole source of news.

Still, Kilgore did much more than develop the manners and mores of modern élite journalism. The newspaper he built was full of idiosyncrasies and peculiarities, like the use of line drawings on the front page instead of photographs, the heavy use of peppy news briefs in lieu of stories, the not very funny daily cartoon cornily titled “Pepper . . . and Salt,” the right-wing editorial page, and the goofy human-interest story in the middle of every day’s front page. No less than Hearst’s Journal and Pulitzer’s World, the Wall Street Journal bore the stamp of Kilgore’s personality, which turned out to be one that appealed to a large audience of phlegmatic businessmen like him.

When Rupert Murdoch bought the Wall Street Journal, in 2007, it was as if somebody had hit the rewind button on the history of journalism. The paper still bore Kilgore’s stamp—Peter Kann, who was the C.E.O. of Dow Jones until 2006, started out in journalism as a copy boy at the Princeton Packet, which Kilgore owned—but Murdoch represents a throwback to the pre-burgher age in newspapers. He is much closer to Hearst than to Kilgore; in fact, the similarities are striking. Murdoch, like Hearst, was the son of a prominent father who died when he was young, grew up in the distant frontier reaches of a great power, was raised to think of himself as an aristocrat and was educated at the finest schools of the establishment, took over a provincial newspaper that his father had acquired (in Murdoch’s case, the Adelaide News), and conquered the world through a golden touch for mass-circulation journalistic populism. What Hearst created in the Journal, Murdoch created in the Sun, the popular down-market British tabloid that he acquired in 1969, best known for its bare-breasted “Page 3 girl” and its gossip about the Royal Family. Like Hearst, Murdoch flouts the rules decreeing strict separation of journalism and politics and of news and entertainment, is hated by the respectable classes, lives lavishly, and sits atop a great pile of media holdings—much greater, thanks to globalization and the advent of new technologies, than Hearst’s ever was.

“Inside Rupert’s Brain,” by Paul R. La Monica (Portfolio; $24.95), is a short book that does not suggest extensive authorial labor. Aside from a few quotes from stock-market analysts and journalism-school professors, there is no evidence of original research, and certainly not of access to Murdoch or anybody who knows him. It is useful mainly as a précis of Murdoch’s long and frenetic career, which involves machinations in Australia, Italy, Britain, the United States, China, and outer space (if you count his satellite businesses), and the endless buying and selling of newspapers, magazines, book publishers, television stations, cable systems, Web sites, and sports franchises. Most of Hearst’s biographers (though not Kenneth Whyte) have portrayed him as a man who often did business in economically irrational ways; “I didn’t care about making money,” he supposedly once said. Murdoch can seem to be like that—he has stuck with the Times of London, the New York Post, and the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard through years of unprofitability—but he can also be unsentimental in unloading properties that disappoint him, like TV Guide, New York, the National Star, the Village Voice, and the Los Angeles Dodgers. Congenitally incautious, he lives in a free-floating jurisdiction all his own, borrowing, buying, selling, influencing, negotiating, and manipulating according to no easily discernible plan.

Murdoch usually avoids the press, unless he’s buying one, but over the years he has made a few characteristically unpredictable choices about which reporters to talk to. In the early nineteen-nineties, he gave access to the crusading British journalist William Shawcross, which resulted in an admiring biography; now Michael Wolff, the dyspeptic media columnist for Vanity Fair, has written a Murdoch book called “The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch” (Broadway; $29.95). Wolff talked not only to Murdoch and to Murdoch’s chief lieutenants at NewsCorp but also, on Murdoch’s insistence, to his four adult children (most of whom have a complicated relationship with him), his wife, and his mother, who has just turned a hundred.

It’s possible to guess at Murdoch’s calculation here—though, as usual, he was taking a gamble. Unlike most journalists, Wolff finds media deal-making completely fascinating. He’s clever and attention-commanding, partly because you know there’s another nasty poke at somebody waiting around every turn in the story, and he can make asset acquisition, the stuff of Murdoch’s career, come to life by endowing it with emotional significance. Wolff also identifies with Murdoch’s sense of being an anti-establishment maverick. (Not long ago, he described me in his Vanity Fair column as “as stuffy a grandee as you’re likely to find in this disintermediated age, a mandarin in his self-conceit, gray and indistinct in his affect.”) He’s on the side of the colorful guys, the outsiders and the risk-takers. He’d be the last one to get all huffy about Murdoch’s departures from the norms and standards of the journalistic high priesthood.

So how did the arrangement work out for Murdoch? Not all that well. Wolff never subjects Murdoch to moralizing, and seems to admire his success, but he has learned a great deal and he uses that knowledge mercilessly. Wolff has a permanent case of what Dorothy Parker used to call “the frankies.” He can’t resist using the telling, belittling detail whenever he encounters it, which in this case is often. (There’s a funny list of all the names that Murdoch’s wife, Wendi, dropped during Wolff’s interview with her.) The details accrete. To anyone who has been socialized to admire the bourgeois values, Murdoch seems repellent in his need to control and dominate every relationship and every situation, to find and exploit everybody’s weakness. He is surrounded by yes-men. Two of his children have quit or been driven out of executive jobs at NewsCorp. Murdoch is at roughly the stage of his career that Hearst was when Orson Welles made “Citizen Kane”; historically speaking, not enough time has elapsed for him to come across as a colorful figure from the rough-hewn past, as Hearst does now.

“The Man Who Owns the News” is mainly the story of Murdoch’s successful pursuit of Dow Jones, interwoven with a brisk recap of his life up to that point. Before Murdoch bought Dow Jones, the company was owned by the Bancroft family, comprising dozens of heirs, none of whom were working at the Wall Street Journal. It was not remotely for sale, but Murdoch picked the lock of the family’s hold on the company, in one big way—publicly offering a price that was far higher than what Dow Jones stock was trading for—and many small ones. Murdoch, Wolff tells us, first had a fund manager named Andy Steginsky quietly approach sale-friendly family members and use the information he got from them to compile a detailed chart that explained the complicated factions and alliances within the family. Then, in one of the most chilling set pieces in the book, Murdoch expertly played Dow Jones’s new chief executive, Richard Zannino, getting him to open up a back channel of communication without telling the company’s board. (Soon after the sale, Murdoch tossed Zannino over the gunwales.) In the final stages, family members who favored the sale were transmitting to Murdoch’s agent Steginsky, via concealed cell phone, the proceedings of a crucial private meeting. In the end, the family was so eager to sell that it failed to figure out that Murdoch was willing to increase his price.

It was a deal-making triumph—and a financial disaster. Murdoch overpaid, taking on debt to do so, just at the moment that both the newspaper business and the financial sector upon which the Journal depends for advertising were about to plummet. NewsCorp stock traded at twenty-one dollars a share on the day the Journal sale closed, and is under eight dollars today. That’s thirty billion dollars of lost value. In February, Murdoch announced an $8.4-billion write-down, a good chunk of which is attributable to the Journal, and in the last quarter of 2008 his company lost $6.4 billion. But then, in Wolff’s portrayal, Murdoch is a man in love with a probably bygone style of newspapering, and also with power but not with money. Since coming to America, in the nineteen-seventies, he has never really made a newspaper work economically; his billions have come from television and movies. His masterstroke as a businessman was assembling the Fox television network and then making it home to low-budget hits like “American Idol.” But, according to Wolff, this part of his empire bores Murdoch: his true obsession is not the Journal but the New York Times, which he would like either to drive out of business or to buy, no matter what the cost.

Murdoch turned seventy-eight last month. The heir to NewsCorp appears to be his second son, James, whom Wolff presents as stylish and glib. Wendi Murdoch, his third wife and the mother of his two youngest children, comes across as a trendy, globalist liberal under whose influence Murdoch has come to regard Fox News and some of his other right-wing associations as embarrassing. It’s easy to imagine NewsCorp suffering the same fate that he visited upon the Bancrofts’ Dow Jones—a sale brought on by weak economic performance and family disharmony.

So far, Murdoch has followed the Times of London script with the Journal (and has brought someone over from the Times, Robert Thomson, to run it). Murdoch obviously means to transform it from a second read to a first read. Therefore many of the quirks are gone—there are big color photographs on the front page now, and headlines that aren’t confined to a single column, and stories that are about the same subjects as the stories on other newspapers’ front pages—but he certainly has not turned the Journal into a national edition of the New York Post. It’s still a great paper, but in a more conventional way.

Media moguls—journalism moguls, anyway—need two sets of skills. They have to be able to select and package material from the world in a way that gives it order and narrative drive and swagger. They also have to forge, through creativity, cunning, and force, a set of arrangements with customers, competitors, governments, advertisers, production facilities, and distribution networks which can generate a lot of money. Even in an era of focus groups and marketing research, any news publication that attracts an audience has to have a personality, which means that it has to bear the stamp of a real person. (That person doesn’t have to be glamorous or trendy; he or she just has to have an industrial-strength sensibility—think of DeWitt Wallace, of Reader’s Digest, or Michael Bloomberg.) Often, the personality remains, preserved by successors, long after the original mogul is gone.

These days, there is an unspoken longing, at least among journalists, for media moguls. Even Murdoch is accorded a sneaking gratitude for his willingness to make heavy investments in the newspaper business, at a time when everybody else seems to be disinvesting. Who cares if he’s not being rational? We now may see the history of journalism rewinding even farther, back to the time before the burghers and before the impresarios, when there wasn’t much of a market for news and there was a seamless connection between journalism and politics. Substantial realms of journalism, especially in newer media like the blogosphere and cable television, are already hard to distinguish from political activity. As government gets bigger and more consequential, the worry is not that there will be no one to purvey the news but that the news will no longer remain an independent and countervailing power.

Of course, politicians and press barons have a lot in common: they both build a constituency by representing reality in a particular way, and they are both perpetually trying to gain advantage. Most media moguls, as they have built up their empires, have tried to exercise political power. Sometimes, they’ve wanted political influence in order to help themselves economically—think of William Paley, of the heavily regulated CBS television network—and sometimes they’ve wanted to expand their business in order to have more political power, as in the case of Henry Luce, of Time Inc., who was perhaps the most politically influential media mogul in American history. Even the publishers who think of themselves as straitlaced holders of a “public trust” are not entirely uninterested in political power—why else let politicians woo their endorsements?

Still, the owners of media empires seldom have direct access to the levers of state power. Indeed, all the qualities that make them appear menacing when they’re alive, and admirably larger than life when they’re dead, contribute to their ability to constitute a genuine Fourth Estate. A power-hungry media mogul is an independent social force—more independent, of course, when politicians he disapproves of are in power. That ought to count for something. And if, in the bargain, we get news, or entertainment, or even higher blood pressure from being infuriated, that’s another benefit. These days, we seem to be drifting toward the world that media reformers have dreamed about for half a century, where the press is made up entirely of small players. If we get there, we may find ourselves missing the dinosaurs who once roamed the earth. ♦

Nicholas Lemann joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 1999, and has written the Letter from Washington and the Wayward Press columns for the magazine.